Biography

Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology and Quantitative Methods, University of California, Irvine, 2014

I joined Durham University as an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Psychology in September, 2018.

I study moral judgment, including how desires to blame and punish others influence perceptions of control and responsibility and how people strategically justify their own punitive tendencies. Currently, I am working on a number of projects investigating the contexts (e.g., relationships between punisher and offender, cultural norms) that influence affective reactions to punishing others as well as actual punishment decisions.

I also study political bias, which is the tendency for people to be highly credulous toward information that supports their ideological views and highly skeptical of similar information that opposes their views. I am particularly interested in how political commitments among social scientists influence the empirical questions they ask and the empirical conclusions they draw.